


The Last of the Firsts

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Angst, Background Het, Blaqk Audio times, Davey's harem, M/M, New Years, Nils Bue, mortality anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:52:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is ending, and Jade chooses to spend New Years with Davey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last of the Firsts

**Author's Note:**

> This is short, and angsty, and sexless. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Oh, it's also about mortality. LIKE EVERY OTHER THING I WRITE. What happened is that I saw those pictures from the New Year, and sat down to write this.I don't own them, nor any of their friends/fuckbuddies/fiances. This didn't happen.

He wakes up in Ryan’s basement, surprised he’s slept at all. There’s too much light, and the fold-out futon is dipping down in the middle like some tired beast of burden, legs quivering from bearing their weight. He keeps his eyes shut, knowing that when he opens them, he’ll see Ryan’s basement the way Ryan’s basement has always looked. It never changes. The same poster of Henry Rollins all sliced up by his own onstage razor wielding. The huge plasma screen TV hanging above the stereo, glinting and black. The collage of pepsi and coke bottle caps. The faux oak edge of the foozeball table.

If he opens his eyes, that’s what his view will consist of, so he keeps them shut against the incoming glare of sunlight. He can sense the infernal heat of Jade’s sleeping body beside him, and he tries not to hate. 

He’s spent countless nights in this fold-out mattress with Nils, or sometimes between Nils and some other young, smooth person. That’s what the Rollins poster, bottle caps, and entertainment center view remind him of: being inside of, but not the incarnate of youth. That, and the sensation of loneliness in a crowded room. 

Pressing backwards against Jade, he sifts through his mind to find a word that describes how this sensation is different. Jade groans, his arms stirring against the winged back in front of him. “Dave?” he mumbles, a wet sound in his throat. 

He holds his breath, screws his eyes and his jaw so tightly shut that they hurt. He wants to roll out of the futon without looking at the wall or the thing behind him; he has to piss and wishes he was already stumbling to the bathroom. But it’s cold outside the duvet and he’s not wearing any clothes.

“Did you sleep?” Jade asks, coughing. 

“Miraculously,” He answers, reaching behind him to pull Jade’s warm hand cross his own abdomen, making Jade trace the jutting relief of his own ribs and hips before he wakes up enough to think twice about it. 

“Oh good,” Jade mumbles. He fits their bodies together. “Is anyone else up?” 

He listens, and can hear footsteps and wordless sounds of conversation echoing above them in Ryan’s kitchen. There’s CJ and Ryan’s voices, low and loud, and then the lighter, broken glass tinkling of Ryan’s new girlthing. She dresses like it’s the 1940s, with fake flowers in her dyed red hair and pillbox hats with veils. Her name might be Eva. 

“They’re moving around upstairs,” he says, and rolls over so his voice gets trapped and muffled in the hollow under Jade’s clavicle. There’s a sharp intake of breath that could have come from either of them. He can smell Jade all around him, too familiar and almost sickening in its abundance of memories.   
Jade doesn’t answer, and instead touches flesh thoughtfully with a firmness to his hand. Then he says, “You know, yesterday might have been the last New Years Eve Blaqk Audio ever plays. It might have been our last New Years Eve, ever.” 

In the quiet following Jade’s words, he sits up and finally opens his eyes. He keeps them on the rumpled olive sheets around them, where he roots around for the shirt he tried to sleep in. It’s black and white stripes, and should stand out but doesn’t. He knows that Jade’s only bringing this up because it’s the first day in 2012, and he, like the rest of the world, is aware of their imminent end more than usual. 

“You could say that about any New Years Eve. You could say that about any day. That it could have been our last, ever.” 

“Of course.” 

He finds his shirt, and struggles into it. Then he slides out of bed, the hard-wood paneling chilly and riddled with the same knots and streaks of darkness they’ve always had. He steps on them as he has on mornings before his, mornings when his thighs were itchy and with a crust of drying come. 

“But,” Jade adds, turning to meet retreating wings. “I wanted you to know I thought about it. Does it mean anything that I choose to spend it with you?” 

Davey stops, hands braced against the doorframe to the bathroom. _On business_ he wants to say, but only because he’s gotten into the habit of defending himself. 

_______________

He’s sitting beside Davey, and their legs are almost, but not-quite touching. He blinks through sleep in his eyes, sniffing at the coffee he’s just been handed, trying to shake the strangeness of being in Ryan’s kitchen by distracting himself with the green ceramic and caffeine in his hands. It’s in a chipped Oakland A’s mug, just French roast with half-and-half so Davey won’t ask to share.

“I can’t believe I’m serving coffee to half of AFI,” girl who may be Eva gushes to Davey as she hands him some silly steaming latte thing with lots of soy and agave. “It’s pretty wild.” 

Davey doesn’t say anything, he just smiles this warm smile and beckons to her, placing his hand across her smooth, round cheek. She has piercings in her dimples, rhinestones that catch the morning sunlight along with her incessant beaming. 

“She’s just a doll, Ryan,” Davey coos then, and pulls her to him so he can kiss her on the mouth, a lingering kiss he saves for the girlfriends and boyfriends of the other people he kisses like this, people like Ryan and Trevor, straightedge straight boys who’d fuck him if it ever went there, if he ever kissed them with kisses that were more than this kind of kiss. It’s a game, a game of _almost, but not-quite but can’t you imagine what it would be like?_ She giggles into Davey’s mouth, blushing so hard it heats the room up. 

He doesn’t know what these kisses feel like, what they do to you. He doesn’t know, because Davey has never kissed him like that. 

Ryan has his back to the kitchen table; he’s at the black granite countertop fiddling with the espresso machine. He hears the exchange, though, and without turning around he says, “Dave, are you kissing my girl?” 

Davey pulls away, back knocking into the pair of tense, white knuckled hands cradling the Oakland A’s mug. Coffee sloshes on pale skin. 

“Ryan, you just come get some sugar, too,” Davey purrs. Ryan looks over at his shoulder at him, eyes tired and lined from little sleep and too much dancing. Finally he comes over, and lets Davey kiss him closed mouth but wet, Maybe Eva watching with an odd, shocked smile. 

“Speaking of sugar, where my Bue?” Davey asks once Ryan pushes him off to tend to the beeping espresso machine. 

“Still in bed, I’m sure. He was pretty shitfaced last night. Told more than one person how you broke his heart,” Ryan explains, gesturing somewhere to the living room lined with air mattresses and sleeping naked twenty-somethings. 

Davey smiles, without it meeting his eyes. 

Making a polite effort to include him, seeing as he’s sitting silent and seething beside Davey’s many kisses, Maybe Eva says, “So Jade, how about you? How’s your girlfriend? She left pretty early on.” 

“Yeah, she’s still in school. Had some studying to do,” he says, and reminds himself to say it from somewhere else besides between his teeth. His answer isn’t entirely true. She is a student, but the semester is over. She left because he told her to, because it could have been the beginning of the last twelve months left in the earth’s history, and he wanted to spend it alone, behind Davey. Alone in a crowded room, listening to the voice of something that made him feel, when he was still capable of such things. 

“Fiance, sorry!” Maybe Eva corrects herself, hardly hearing him. She hits her own forehead with a palm. “I keep forgetting.” 

_So do I,_ he thinks, and reminds himself that when people say girlfriend, he’s supposed to be the one to tell them otherwise. With a note of something in his voice, pride, joy, all he’s ever wanted, _something_. Something more than the satisfaction of knowing B comes after A, and C comes after B, and there are steps and they go in that order. 

“Right, fiance,” he says quietly, a mumble into the rim of his coffee mug, where his lip rests against the chip. He can feel Davey looking at him, so he shifts his legs a millimeter so that it presses insistently against the muscles in Davey’s thigh. He’s not sure if it’s reassurance or warning. 

“When are you guys gonna get married?” Ryan asks, looking at Davey as he says it, like he’s trying to read a book in another language. 

“We haven’t set a date yet,” he says evenly. 

Davey clears his throat, and pulls his leg away. 

Inside, Jade thinks _not within the next year, so maybe never._

________________

 

He takes his suit jacket off the corner of the couch and puts it on, even though it looks ridiculous with his grey jeans and oversized striped shirt. “Lets go on a walk,” he suggests. “First walk on the first of the last year.” 

They’ve just made it down Ryan’s too-groomed suburban block when Jade links arms with him. They carry on this way, quietly, chastely, until he says, “So, you haven’t set a date?” 

“I was just waiting for you to bring her up,” Jade sighs, tightening his grip around his bicep, fingers digging in between familiar, tattooed muscles. 

“I didn’t being her up. Just your absence of concrete plans. It interests me,” he says, smiling and letting his head ever so briefly dust Jade’s shoulder, just a whisper of warm. There are people walking by, and no one is giving them a second glance. 

“Weddings take years to plan,” Jade says cryptically. 

“I think you’re just putting it off until the world ends,” he sighs, pulling his arm away from Jade. He looks critically at him for a moment, at the crisp fringe of chestnut hair sweeping his brow, at the tired heaviness beneath his eyes, and too-pink shine of his skin like it has been scrubbed clean in the morning, a futile attempt at scouring his flesh free of age. 

“What are you looking at?’ Jade says uncertainly, dropping his head so that he can hide more than one eye beneath his hair. 

“You. I think it best that I remember what you looked like, on the first day of the last year,” he says, hands climbing up Jade’s chest and staying there, flat and open just under the jut of collarbones. He can feel a quick heart under the plane of bone and skin, and Jade’s eyes darken. 

The air is too warm for January, and the breeze smells both dusty like wildfires and clean with citrus, the way the OC often smells. It’s a smell that used to remind him of losing Jade, but now, it might remind him of what it feels like to know that he somehow kept him. Kept him in spite of all the wet, closed mouth kisses, in spite of being alone in a crowded room and a unknown date some years down the line. 

“You’ll have the rest of the year to memorize that,” Jade’s voice is thick. 

He shakes his head, and even though they’re outside and there are soccer moms in track pants walking their yorkies, and hung over bros slouched in lawn chairs on their porches, he takes Jade’s face firmly between two hands, and kisses him. It’s the kind of kiss he saves for Jade, the kind that means he wishes he could quit but cannot. He sobs into it, and their tongues fight. 

Perhaps Jade lets him because he thinks the world is ending. 

It doesn’t matter, because Davey knows that you could say that about any day.


End file.
